Bücher veröffentlicht von Firbolg Publishing

After two centuries of literary and pop culture procreation, Victor Frankenstein and his monster are as virile as ever: synthetic biology, genetically modified organisms, artificial intelligence, the creation of one life at the cost of others. On the threshold of the third century, we stand on unforeseen shores of deep, far-reaching scientific and technological waters. And yet no truth-told tale is ever far from the sublime, the supernatural, the interior. The alchemy of art is always central to the story. In the case of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, the lives of those involved in its making were as dramatic and mysterious as any character from literature. In 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, lover and future wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, conceived the idea for Frankenstein during a summer of darkness. Within a few years of the novel's publication, three of the members involved in its conception were dead. Suicide, premature death, and tragedy are as woven into the tale as the words themselves. Frankenstein is at heart the story of a very misguided "parent" whose destructive offspring outlives him both in the novel and in our collective imagination. Ambition divorced from responsibility; genius wedded to derangement; the creator who rejects his own creation so fully he will not even give it a name. It is a tale of monsters and their monstrosities; it is thus also, of course, a very human tale, and one that continues to be written. Featuring artwork from award-winning artist Robert Payne Cabeen, this collection brings together two hundred years' worth of monstrous birthings: facts and fictions, lore and lunacy from the underground laboratories where monsters are both born and made.

Human beings comprise earth's only death cult. Unique in our intellectual capabilities, we regard our dead with love, fear, sorrow, and awe. From the earthly corpse to the cosmic soul, we seek to speak with the dead, engage with them, and keep some essential part of them with us. Most of all, we hope not for their finite decay, but for its opposite: that those we love will live on after death, and that we will, too. Since the beginning of recorded history, artists, spiritualists, philosophers, and seekers of all kinds have taken the leap into the great mysteries of existence and the even greater possibilities of immortality. Fortunately for us, most of them lived to tell a tale or two. In Firbolg Publishing's second grimoire collection, we bring together an eclectic mix of fiction, poetry, essays and reflections, artwork, historical documents, and odd ephemera to explore centuries' worth of attitudes, expressions, and eccentricities regarding life, death, the afterlife, and the extraordinary spaces in between. Featuring artists both past and present, we take readers on a deep dive into the uniquely human way of exploring, experiencing, and expressing both the many blessings and profound tragedies of life, death, and what remains.Fully illustrated in color/black and white artwork and photography from both modern and historical artists and sources.